Page:The works of Anna Laetitia Barbauld volume 1.djvu/52

 nary Essay, to which she gave her name. This delightful piece may perhaps be regarded as the most successful of her efforts in literary criticism; and that it should be so, is easily to be accounted for. There were many striking points of resemblance between her genius and that of Addison. As prose writers, both were remarkable for uniting wit of the light and sportive kind with vividness of fancy, and a style at once rich and lively, flowing and full of idiom: both of them rather avoided the pathetic: in both, "the sentiments of rational and liberal devotion" were "blended with the speculations of philosophy and the paintings of a fine imagination:" both were admirable for "the splendour they diffused over a serious, the grace with which they touched a lighter subject." The humorous delineation of manners and characters in deed, in which Addison so conspicuously